People call the Rijksmuseum the Louvre of Amsterdam, and I understand why. Both are national collections in enormous nineteenth-century buildings, both are built around one painting everybody has come to see, and …

I do not drink beer. I booked a beer tour anyway, paid extra for the upgraded version of it, and spent an hour in a bar hidden behind a refrigerator door. That …

Every May I go to the Canadian Tulip Festival in Ottawa. It is a fixture of my spring, and after enough visits I thought I had a reasonable idea of what a …

We went up twice during our stay. Once in the late afternoon, when the doors onto the terrace had been folded back and the sun was coming in low across the room, …

We had breakfast first, at Locals, a few minutes away, and then walked over to Stadhouderskade because the tour was booked for a specific time and the VIP one does not wait …

I crossed Dam Square four or five times over a week in Amsterdam and it never once impressed me. That is not what the guidebooks say. This is the most important public …

Amsterdam on 27 April is orange. King’s Day empties the offices and fills the canals, and by mid-afternoon most of the city is on a boat, on a bicycle, or sitting on …

I will be honest about my first impression, because it was wrong and it took an hour to correct. From the square, the Royal Palace underwhelmed me. I had come to Amsterdam …

Here is what I knew about Jean-Michel Basquiat before I walked into that room: he went out with Madonna. That was it. That was the whole of it. A man with work …

The Royal Palace on Dam Square has one room that most visitors walk straight past. It sits on the ground floor, on the Dam side, and it is numbered 21 on the …

I walked into this exhibition knowing nothing. I could not have said what Johan Cruyff played, when, or for whom. I knew the name the way a person knows a name: something …

The building on the west side of Dam Square is called the Royal Palace, and it was not built for a king. It was built by a city that had grown rich …